Sunday, August 2, 2015

Interview with Muhammad Yunus, author of Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing NeedsArt Dalglish

September, 2010

It all started with a gift of $27.

In 1974, Muhammad Yunus was an economics professor at Chittagong University in Bangladesh when a combination of war, natural disasters and an international oil crisis toppled his country into a devastating famine. How could he simply teach elegant theories of the free market, he thought, while hunger and poverty threatened the lives of millions?

Venturing into the countryside to experiment with social programs, he found a woman in the village of Jobra who was borrowing from a local moneylender to finance her tiny business handcrafting bamboo stools. But she could borrow only at a very high interest rate and by agreeing to sell her work to the lender at a price he set, leaving her with almost no profit.

Yunus and his students found a total of 42 villagers trapped in the same kind of arrangement. He realized that he could release all of them from their economic bondage by reaching into his pocket for the equivalent of $27 and paying off all their loans.

Inspired by this example, Yunus created Grameen Bank to make low-interest loans to the poorest of the poor, people with no collateral or credit history. Today it serves more than 8 million people—97 percent of them women—in every village in Bangladesh, extending more than $100 million a month in loans averaging about $200. Grameen is also helping to spread the idea known as microcredit throughout the world—and in 2006, Yunus and the bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Price for their accomplishments.

Seeking new ways for the power of the market to help the poor, Yunus landed on the concept of “social businesses.” These companies operate like any other, competing in the marketplace to make a profit, with two big exceptions: The investors agree not to take any money from the company beyond their original investment, and the overriding goal is to deliver a particular social benefit to people in need.